In my post The Influence of the Silence of the Lambs, I referred to the impression that movie made on me. I later learned that the character of Buffalo Bill was based on several real-life killers. One of those killers was Gary Heidnik. This is a long one, not gonna lie. And I don’t think I am done. I hope to do a follow up to this blog post, looking more in depth at what happened to the surviving victims and whether or not they were compensated for what they endured.
But, for now here we go.
First off, let me just say that when I realized that Ted Levine was not only Buffalo Bill, but also Leland Stottlemeyer from the television series Monk, I was gobsmacked.
Was Heidnik the inspiration for Buffalo Bill? Sort of. The only similarity between his crimes and Buffalo Bill’s was that Heidnik would place his victims in a pit in his basement to torture them. That’s where the similarities end, however. Gary used his victims as sex slaves and preyed on vulnerable, sometimes intellectually disabled women. Still, as I stated in my post referred to above, John Douglas did apparently say he was a partial inspiration for Buffalo Bill.
Gary Heidnik was born in Eastlake, Ohio on November 22, 1943. Eastlake is a suburb of Cleveland. His crimes, however, were committed in Philadelphia, PA. He and his brother Terry moved with their mother following the parents’ divorce in 1946, then moved in with their father 4 years later presumably due the mother’s alcoholism. He claimed that his father was very abusive and mean. Gary claims that he was a bed wetter and his father would mock him mercilessly about this, sometimes in public.
During his youth, Gary was partially schooled in a military academy, then joined the army at age 17. He was only enslisted for 13 months before he was honorably discharged for schizoid personality disorder. He also complained of a myriad of physical ailments including headaches, nausea, blurred vision, dizziness and others.
Gary and his brother Terry blamed these symptoms on a fall from a tree that Gary suffered as a child. He fell on the crown of his head, flattening it. He was mockingly called ‘football head’ following this, but Terry says his personality changed following this fall.
Heidnik's life before . . .
The next several years were spent in and out of mental hospitals and included approimately 13 suicide attempts. Gary’s own mother died by suicide in 1970 while suffering from bone cancer and her battle with alcoholism. His brother, Terry, also had several suicide attempts in his past.
Soon after his mother’s death, Gary incorporated his own church called the United Church of the Ministers of God. The church started out quite small but began to grow by 1975. He referred to himself as Brother Bishop. He started a bank account with $1,500 but this later grew to over $500,000 (nearly $3M today) which is quite remarkable considering they met in his house and the congregation was quite small.
It’s also remarkable because in the couple of years that followed (1976 and 1978) Gary was committing serious crimes and having children with intellectually disabled women.
His first child, Gary Jr. was born to Gail Lincow. He was removed from his mother’s care and put in foster care due to her inability to care for the child. Then he had a daughter, Maxine, with Anjeanette Davidson in 1978. This child suffered the same outcome as Gary Jr.
In 1976, he was convicted of aggravated assault and carrying an unlicensed pistol, which he shot at the tenant of a house he was offering, just grazing the person’s face. Finally, in 1978, he was convicted and imprisoned for the kidnapping and rape of Anjeanette’s sister, Alberta.
Alberta was living in a home for the mentally disabled when Gary signed her out for the day. However, he kept her and imprisoned her in his basement. When she was found (and returned to her home) she had been raped, sodomized and contracted gonorrhea. He was convicted and released in April 1983.
I read in an article on Oxygen True Crime‘s site that Gary, at this time, felt society owed him a wife and child. This may be true in his own warped mind, but he was determined to have children in his life by whatever means. His victims would later confirm in court that this was how he felt.
In 1985, Gary married a women named Betty Disto, who was from the Philippines. He met her through a “matrimonial service.” Within three months, Betty had left him, claiming abuse, rape and forcing her to watch while he had sex with other women, sometimes several other women. He was convicted of spousal rape for the acts committed on Betty.
Unknown to Gary, Betty was pregnant when she left him. He only found out when she later sued for child support. She gave birth to a son, Jesse Jon Disto, in September 1986. What happened with his three children may play an important role in what was to come.
The horrors in the basement begin....
Later in 1986, Gary kidnapped his first victim for which he would later become famous. He learned from his mistakes with the previous abduction of Alberta. He would make sure his next victim could not leave. This victim was Josefina Rivera.
Josefina was a sex worker. Like all of Gary’s victims, she was African American. Gary was white. On November 26, 1986, the night before Thanksgiving, Josefina was on the street hoping to earn enough money to buy herself a nice dinner the next day. She and her boyfriend had been fighting earlier that day, and she wasn’t in a hurry to go back to his apartment.
Gary owned a nice Cadillac and was cruising the streets, hunting. Well, it’s more likely that the Church owned the Cadillac. He negotiated a price when he came upon Josefina and she climbed into his car, taking in the new car smell. She told him her name was Nicole, as she often did not use her real name when working. After a stop at McDonald’s for a cup of coffee (for him – he offered her nothing), they went back to Gary’s house.
Josefina wanted to get the evening over with quickly and suggested they get to it. Gary led her upstairs to the bedroom. Prior to the sexual transaction, Gary gave Josefina $20, which she put on the dresser. When they had finished, “Nicole” began to dress. She had only her shirt on when Gary began to choke her from behind. Once she was subdued, he grabbed the $20 and put it back into his pocket and forced her down stairs, then down another set of stairs into a dark, cold and damp basement. This is where she would remain for the next several months, nearly starved, freezing, naked and scared.
Nicole, as Gary knew her, was not in the basement very long before she learned what her captor had in store for her. He explained, quite calmly and with some excitement, that he planned to capture ten women with whom he could have multiple children who could never leave him. He was very upset about losing his other children to the State or the women simply leaving him. He was taking control and would raise his own family. Josefina looked around and knew that she was the first to be abducted and that there would soon be more.
Three days later, Josefina was suffering in the basement. She had refused the food Gary had tried to feed her out of fear that it might be poisoned. The basement was freezing and she had no clothing except the shirt she had managed to put on before Gary forced her into the basement. She was chained to a pipe and couldn’t move around. She had tried to escape once by stretching the chain as far as she could and reaching a window. She was caught by Gary and severely punished with a beating then put into a hole or pit that Gary had dug through the concrete floor. She was forced to stay in the hole for over 24 hours.
Music was blaring so loud she could hardly think. Gary believed if he left loud music playing at all times, no one would hear her if she tried to scream. It served as a constant reminder that she was being punished for trying to escape. The only good thing about it was the radio announcers would always let her know the date and time so she could track her captivity.
The next victims appear....
While still in the pit on November 29, Josefina heard footsteps coming down the basement stairs and she thought she heard someone crying. She was sure she heard Gary , over the music, yelling for someone to shut up. Soon, Gary removed the cover over the pit and Josefina was pulled out. When her eyes adjusted, she saw another woman standing there, naked but for her shirt, handcuffed. Gary introduced “Nicole” to Sandra Lindsay, 25.
Over the next few days, Josefina learned that Sandra had known Gary for quite a long time and had even been in a sort of relationship with him. She and Gary had sex multiple times, Sandra explained. Gary wanted her to get pregnant but she did not want to have his child. Sandra, it was clear to Josefina, was slow. She didn’t know if she was mentally disabled, but she thought maybe she was.
Over the next month, both women were forced to have sex with Gary every day. He hoped to get at least one of them pregnant immediately. However, he was keeping them nearly starved and what little food they did get had no nutritional value. They were losing weight and becoming unhealthy very quickly. They were also filthy from living in the basement and Gary refused to let them bathe.
Just before Christmas, on December 22, 1986, a third woman was dragged into the basement. Lisa Ann Thomas was only 18 years old. Again, Josefina and her new ‘roommate’ Sandra were in the pit when Lisa was brought downstairs. She was startled when he pulled the wooden top off the pit and two nearly nude women came crawling out.
This had to be terrifying, but I wonder if she might also have been a little relieved to know she was not going to be down there all alone. Lisa was not a sex worker, but had agreed to accept a ride from Gary. After spending some time together, she further accepted money for clothes that he offered, so they could go someplace nice together.
He seemed to be able to fool these women into trusting him because he had a nice car and money to spend. Somehow, he knew they had limited mental ability and would be susceptible to being captured.
Like the others, Lisa was immediately subjected to daily rape and torture from Gary. His desire to father as many children as possible was apparently enough to keep him going to have this much sex every day.
On New Year’s Day, 1987, after spending the worst holidays of their lives in that awful basement, the three captives were greeted with yet another woman, Deborah Johnson Dudley. From the beginning, they all knew this was trouble. Debbie was not subservient, she refused to do as Gary told her and her punishments began very quickly. Johnson demanded to be able to bathe, to use a real toilet, to be given tampons and food. She did not “shut up” when Gary told her to and she was severaly beaten, raped and even electrocuted.
However, Debbie managed to improve conditions in the basement. Following her complaints, the girls were allowed to bathe, one at a time, every few days. He provided them tampons and created a make-shirt toilet for their use.
But Gary’s anger at Debbie grew. He couldn’t understand why she wouldn’t just do as she was told, like the others. He punished her by hanging her from a hook in the ceiling on “the stretcher”. He would bring in a hose and put a couple of feet of water in the pit, then make her stand in it while he would touch live wires to her handcuffs, shocking her. But, Debbie did not give in. She provided no end of trouble to Gary.
It would be 27 days before victim #5 was brought to the basement. Jacquelyn Askins, 18, was brought there on January 18, 1987. Jacquelyn was very petite, almost childlike in her appearance. The shackles were too big for her small feet and ankles – she could slip right out of them. Gary fixed this by using handcuffs on her ankles.
After her initial beating and rape, she was placed in the pit and the others ordered to stand on top of it so she could not escape. She later said the women told her “Don’t fight it.” She quickly fell in line with the others after watching how Debbie was treated for “being bad”.
The tension mounts....
It’s unsure if Gary expected this, but tension was growing between the captured women. Josefina, the first into the basement, had risen to the top of the group, earning Gary’s trust. She had figured out how to manipulate him in order to improve her own lot. I am not judging her here….desperate times call for desperate measures. But the other women were jealous of her position. Each would try and get the others “in trouble” with Gary to avoid punishment themselves.
Who could blame them? It’s well documented that those punishments were horrific. Stretching, hanging by your arms from the ceiling, beatings, rapes, and electric shock. He would feed them dogfood, initially as a punishment but later as a staple in their diet.
The women later reported that Gary used a screwdriver to puncture their eardrums so they could not hear when he could come and go upstairs. At some point, they tried screaming and making noise when he left the house. When he realized this, Gary’s demented solution was to make sure they couldn’t hear when he left or when he returned. He is the epitome of ‘murder and other strange behavior.’ This is more than strange however, it is downright sadistic.
This screwdriver to the ear torture was only applied to Debbie, Lisa and Jacquelyn, however. He trusted “Nicole” at this point and Sandy was punished in a different way.
The women also later reported that Gary would direct them to assault one another. If they didn’t do as they were told, he would beat them himself or they would suffer one of his other forms of torture. Purposefully or not, he had created an environment where the women would regularly turn on one another.
The first victim dies...
By early February, Sandra Lindsay was in bad shape. Due to a punishment, she had been hanging by her wrist from the hook in the ceiling for a week. A week. Can you imagine the pain she endured.
She was in trouble for such terrible infractions as trying to remove the covering from ‘the hole’ and refusing to eat. Gary thought Sandy might be pregnant, so he was very upset when she refused to eat. Makes sense that he would then hang her from the ceiling for a week? What an evil son of a bitch.
He tried to force feed her with no luck. He finally let her down, but when she fell to the ground he simply shoved her with his foot so that she fell into the hole. He believed she was faking when she did not move. He went upstairs and came back later, but Sandy still hadn’t moved. He checked for a pulse and realized she was dead.
Without saying anything to the others, he lifted Sandy over his shoulder and carried her upstairs. A few hours later, the other women heard what they thought was a power saw going upstairs. Horror struck them as they realized what was happening to Sandy’s body.
It’s reported that he fed parts of Sandy’s body to his dogs. It’s also reported, but not proven, that he mixed it with the dogfood he gave to his captors. He certainly made them believe that was true. The rest of Sandy’s body parts were placed in the freezer, but the parts he couldn’t grind or cut up, he tried to boil on the stovetop.
This nearly got him caught because the terrible odor seeped out of the morbid house and into the surrounding neighborhood. Concerned neighbors called the police. They thought from the odor that maybe Gary was dead inside the house and tried to get a well check on him. He finally came to the door when an officer continued knocking, claiming he had simply burned his dinner. The officer left but the neighbors were not satisfied.
The next one dies...
Debbie continued to be a problem for Gary. She pushed him every day, wanting to be treated more like a human being and demanding improvements to their situation. On March 18, Gary had his fill. He decided they would all be punished, except Josefina whom he was still favoring. He had her fill the hole with some water and the others got into it. Then, he used an extension cord that he had partially stripped to bare wire to shock the women by touching it to their chains as they stood in the water.
The women in the pit couldn’t see, but believed that “Nicole” was the one holding the wire. It touched the chains and they all screamed. Debbie seemed to be getting the worst of the shocks and soon fell limp with her face falling into the water. She didn’t move.
After dragging them all out of the hole, Gary took Debbie’s body upstairs. He later made “Nicole” write a confession that she helped kill Debbie and how it was done, ordering her to sign it. He made the others sign as witnesses.
He had decided to dump Debbie’s body. He couldn’t do that with Sandy because she could be tied to him. Debbie could not. He placed her in the freezer to wait until he could take her body and dump it.
After this, Gary began to treat “Nicole” better. He felt sure he had something on her, and was confident that she would not go to the police. She got to wear pants, move about the house unshackled and even go places with Gary in his car. He even drove her to the place where he planned to dump Debbie’s body. All the while, Josefina was plotting their escape.
Pictured here are the six women whom Heidnik kidnapped, tortured and raped in his basement. From top left: Josefina Rivera, Agnes Adams, and Sandra Lindsay, From bottom left: Jacquelyn Askins, Deborah Johnson Dudley and Lisa Thomas.
Gary became frustrated that he was now even further away from having the 10 women he hoped to produce babies for him. On March 23, 1987, Gary took “Nicole” with him to find another victim. The sixth and final woman was brought into the basement.
Agnes Victoria Adams, 24, was actually known to Josefina from working on the streets. They brought her home, after negotiating a price, and she and Gary had sex. He did the same as with the others following sex – choked her, cuffed her and took her to the basement where she was beaten and placed in the hole.
He thought it had gone smoothly and this could be easily repeated to get his harem up to 10 women. But Josefina had other plans.
Somehow, in building a trust between herself and Gary over the last couple of months, Josefina convinced him to let her go and see family. She told him she had three children and needed to let them know she was allright. This was true, Josefina had three children. But they had long ago been removed from her care by social services.
Of course she had to promise not to turn him in. Additionally, she promised to bring him another woman if he let her go see her family. Gary agreed, telling her that if she tried to run, he would kill all the other women.
The plan was to let her out at a gas station close to where she said her family lived. She was to go see her family, pick up the woman she was to bring back for him and return to the gas station at midnight. As soon as Gary pulled away, Josefina ran to her boyfriend’s house, which was close. At first, he did not believe her crazy story, but finally did and they called the police.
Josefina met with officers, who came to her location. They too didn’t believe her at first, but the marks on her ankles and her bruises told them something was going on. They went to the gas station, found Gary and took him into custody for questioning.
Police photo of Heidnik’s home prior to the search warrant in Philadelphia, PA.
Just before 5AM on March 25, 1987, police had their search warrant in hand for Gary’s house. Once inside, they headed for the basement. There they found Lisa Thomas and Jacquelyn Askins sleeping on a dirty mattress, chained to one another. They awoke on hearing the activity. When asked if there were more people, the girls pointed to the hole. Police removed the covering and found Agnes Adams inside. Their nightmare in the cellar was over.
As you can imagine, when the story broke the media went wild. Before they were even able to be treated and released from the hospital, the victims were on the phone talking to reporters. There were so many angles to this story – kidnapping, rape, religion, race, murder and possible cannibalism. It was an avalanche of undesirable information that the whole world was digesting.
Shortly after his arrest, Gary was attacked by other inmates, suffering a broken nose. He was put in special protection, but even then tried again to commit suicide.
It would be more than a year later when Heidnik was brought to trial. In June of 1988, an all white jury was selected under the watchful eye of a female judge, the Honorable Lynne Abraham. The prosecution, led by Charles Gallagher, opened his case with a vivid description of the horrific happenings at 3520 North Marshall Street in Northern Philadelphia. The defense opened their case with “My client is not innocent. He is very, very guilty.” Heidnik’s attorney, Chuck Pureto, later admitted that wasn’t what he really meant to say, but it seemed right at the time. After all, they were going for an insanity defense. Guilt or innocence was not the issue at hand.
In his book, Cellar of Horror: The Story of Gary Heidnik, author Ken Englade goes into great detail about the trial, the jurors and all the parties.
A highlight was the testimony of Josefina Rivera. Because she had been a captive the longest, she had the most information about Gary and all that occurred in the cellar, including the shocking information that after Sandra Lindsey’s death, the remaining victims were fed dogfood mixed with Sandra’s ground up body. Though they had heard a part of this in the opening statement by Gallagher, the jury had to be appalled at this.
The testimony of the living victims all aligned with one another. The defense had a hard time poking holes in their testimony. Though Pureto continued to ask them if they were “prostitutes” and tried to insinuate they were complicit in what was going on, he did not succeed there.
The testimony of the State’s major witnesses went quickly, taking only two days. The information about the autopsies of Lindsay and Johnson were gruesome to say the least, but also went smoothly and without much cross-examination by the defense.
For their part, the defense tried to explain Gary’s behavior. Their psychologist, Dr. Clancy McKenzie, said that after all Gary had been through, he felt rejected by society and sought out those who were also rejected by society. That’s a really nice way of saying he preyed on vulnerable victims in my estimation. When you purposely choose victims with limited mental ability, who are shunned by society (as sex workers are – and certainly were in the 1980’s), to me you know what you are doing.
The only portion of the trial that Gary seemed to show any interest in was the testimony of Robert Kirkpatrick, a rebuttal witness for the State. He had been Gary’s financial broker. The State was trying to show that Gary was not insane, because he was an astute ameature investor. He had, through choices he made, turned the church’s original $1,500 into more than $545,000. Kirkpatrick testifed that Gary kept in touch with him consistently to check on his investments and made intelligent decisions regarding them.
Another psychologist, Dr. Eva Wojciechowski, testified on rebuttal that she had seen Gary on March 16, 1987. This would have been between the deaths of Sandy and Debbie. At that time, he scored a 148 on the IQ test. Only about one half of one percent of people have a score like that. Though she also testified this wasn’t necessarily reflective of his actual IQ, the State was trying to show that Gary was too smart to be insane. The defense response was that IQ has nothing to do with schizophrenia, the diagnosis they were saying Gary suffered from.
When the jury was finally released to deliberate, they did so for about 16 hours over two and a half days. Their verdict on two counts of first degree murder was guilty, and guilty on a total of 18 counts including rape, kidnapping, aggravated assault and involuntary deviate sexual intercourse. The only acquittal was a charge of deviate sexual intercourse involving Josefina Rivera.
The jury was then assigned the task of deciding Heidnik’s sentence. They came back with 2 death sentences for the first degree murder charges.
Of course there were appeals and delays. His daughter Maxine actually resurfaced at some point and developed a relationship with her father. She would fight to prevent his execution, but eventually the sentences were carried out. On July 6, 1999, after a meal of cheese pizza and black coffee, Heidnik was executed by lethal injection. He would be the last person executed by the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania.
The victims...
As for the victims, Josefina Rivera went back to sex work for a time but was able to get out of that life and off drugs eventually. She’s worked multiple jobs and was reunited with the 3 children she had previously given up for adoption. She married and moved to New Jersey.
In an interview with The Mirror in 2014, Rivera said she was still in counseling and experienced panic attacks, but less frequently over time.
Jacquelyn Askins told the Huffington Post in 2014 that she was still living in Pennsylvania close to her two sons and still took medications at that time to deal with her trauma. She was affected by intense flashbacks and could not go into basements.
There are interviews with the victims on Oxygen’s “Monster Preacher” or please read Ken Englade’s book (referred to above) for an indepth look at the victims, the crimes, the trial and the media coverage of this horrific, unimaginable crime.